One giant step for space travel: Virgin Galactic completes first successful test flight
VIRGIN GALACTIC has completed its first successful spaceship test flight two years after the original aircraft’s fatal crash.
SpaceShipTwo - also known as VSS Unity - landed yesterday in Mojave, California.
It successfully detached from its carrier aircraft WhiteKnightTwo just 10 minutes earlier.
The carrier also made a safe landing on the ground.
Sir Richard Branson - Virgin Group founder - joined Virgin Galactic chief executive George Whiteside to witness the monumental flight, manned by two pilots.
It marks a historic step in Virgin’s space tourism mission. Aside from more glide flights, the group will begin rocket-powered journeys for hybrid monitor testing.
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Astronaut Tim Peake commented on the test flight on Twitter.
He wrote: “Good luck with this new phase of the test programme @virgingalactic - safe flight #pushingboundaries.”
On October 31 2014 the original SpaceShipTwo crashed during its test flight in California, killing one pilot and injuring another.
Last year air crash investigators revealed co-pilot error led to the "catastrophic break-up” of the aircraft.
A report by US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators said the resulting "aerodynamic forces" from a premature unlock of the brake system caused them to be applied without anything the crew could do to stop it.
The Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip2, made by Scaled Composites, was broken apart above the Mojave Desert, California, due to the resulting force, during the 2014 test flight.
Co-pilot and dad-of-two Mike Alsbury, 39, who pulled the brakes too early, plummeted nine miles back down to his death during a test launch of the British entrepreneur's VSS Enterprise SpaceShipTwo over the Californian desert last October.
Pilot Peter Siebold, 43, managed to parachute to safety.
The investigation found "no safeguards" were built into the craft's system to overcome the human error.
Officials said unlocking the brakes early should not have made them fully operate and the resulting stress off their operation contributed to the craft breaking apart.
The board determined the probable cause of the accident was Scaled Composites’ failure to "consider and protect against the possibility that a single human error could result in a catastrophic hazard to the SpaceShipTwo vehicle".
Virgin Galactic is an American-based arm of Branson's British Virgin Group.
It aims to develop commercial spacecraft for suborbital spaceflights for space tourists, space science missions, and orbital launches of small satellites.
The long-term aim is to provide orbital human spaceflights for mega rich tourists as well.
Tickets for the space tourism aircraft are available for £197,000 ($250,000) per person.
